arcade controller

There are plenty of Raspberry Pi arcade builds out there, but rarely do we come across something as sleek as [Jochen Zurborg’s] RasPi Arcade Stick. The build combines everything you’d expect from other RasPi arcade projects, but manages to pack everything into the form factor of a portable stick modeled on the Neo Geo 4’s button layout. It may not be as small as the tiny MAME cabinet from last year, but it definitely delivers a more authentic arcade experience.

[Jochen] had previously developed an add-on PCB for the Pi called the PiJamma, which simplifies connections from the RasPi’s GPIOs by providing a JAMMA interface for the controller(s). The Pi and the PiJamma sit inside a custom-made acrylic enclosure and hook up to the buttons and joystick above. Rather than try to fit the Pi directly against a side panel for access to the various outputs, [Jochen] rerouted the USB, HDMI, and headphone jacks and arranged them into a tidy row on the back side of the box. The top piece of the enclosure consists of a sheet of aluminum wrapped in custom artwork, with an additional sheet of acrylic on top for protection. [Jochen] also modified each of the arcade buttons to include LEDs that illuminate the buttons’ acrylic holder, and the case itself appears to have been cut into slats on each side to provide better ventilation.

Check out his project blog for further details and for a huge gallery of progress photos, then see a quick video of the RasPi Arcade Stick after the break.

Anybody can fire up an emulator and play arcade games of yesteryear, but if you want to capture more of the nostalgia, you should build a custom arcade control panel. [Quinn] started her build by narrowing down which games she was most interested in playing, and decided on a straightforward 2-player setup. The biggest challenge was finding joysticks that would allow for switchable 4-way or 8-way control: some games such as Ms. Pac Man were made for 4-way joystick input, and the added positions on a 8-way can lead to confused inputs and frustrated players.

[Quinn] found the solution with a pair of Ultimarc Servo Stik joysticks, which use a servo motor to swap between 4 and 8-way mode. The output from both the joysticks and the buttons feed into an iPac encoder, which converts the signal to emulate a USB keyboard. The panel was first mocked up on butcher paper, with dimensions borrowed from various games: the panel itself resembles Mortal Kombat 2, while the buttons are spaced to match X-Men vs Street Fighter 2. [Quinn] chose some spare melamine—plywood with a plastic coating—to construct the panel, drilled some holes and used a router to carve out space for the joysticks. A USB hub was added to power the servos and to make room for future additions, which [Quinn] will have no difficulty implementing considering that her electrical layout is enviably clean. To cap it all off, she fit two “coin slot” buttons: a quarter placed into a slot serves as a start button when pressed.

[Jamie] built his own USB connected arcade controller. We’ve been seeing a lot of these lately, and they usually involve soldering buttons to a keyboard PCB. But [Jamie] decided to go a different route and use his own microcontroller. This method always gets a bit hairy when it comes to deciding how to connect it to a computer. Dealing with the USB stack used to be quite tricky, but the LUFA project is slowly taking the pain out of the process.

The Lightweight USB Framework for AVRs is an open source project that handles the hard work associated with USB capable AVR microcontrollers. [Jamie] knew that they already had a sample implementation of a hardware joystick. He’s not using one of the supported boards and so wasn’t able to just compile and go. But porting the code to work with his minimus board was simple enough. With the code in place, the physical build was quite simple. The buttons and joystick were mounted on the surface of an overturned drawer. Each is connected to one pin of the controller board and to ground. LUFA makes sure that the device enumerates as a joystick, and [Jamie] was gaming in no time.

[weirdo] sent in this sweet Xbox 360 arcade controller project(translated). He really wanted an arcade controller for the new Mortal Kombat game. After noticing that the expensive retail arcade controllers were missing the trigger buttons, he decided to hack his own together. After dissecting the controller, he soldered in some break out boxes. This will allow him pretty easy reconfiguration. Wanting some additional customization, he added LEDs to the buttons. Most people add LEDs to the buttons, so that’s not a huge deal, but he also added one to the ball on the end of the joystick. That added touch almost makes us forget that this thing is housed in a pizza box. To be fair, he wants to refine the button layout for a while before he makes a final enclosure.